Gertrude Walker (front) St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections and Annie Clark, Administrative Assistant, work to verify the results of an Accuview optical scanner following a ballot recount at the Supervisor of Elections office early Wednesday November 7, 2012.

Treasure Coast Newspapers

ST. LUCIE COUNTY — Preliminary election results were all in at about 1:40 a.m. Wednesday.

Preliminary results are posted on the department's web site, she said.

This morning the department will be calculating the percentage of voter turnout. The web site shows that there were 175,554 people eligible to vote. On Tuesday the number of individual voting cards cast in the multiple card ballot totaled 247,713. Each voter cast two cards.

The elections supervisor's office and its website experienced a host of problems Tuesday night. Chief among them were a left-behind voting machine and a glitch in the tabulation of early voting ballots.

Officials at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday were awaiting the arrival of the machine containing voting results from the Tradition Town Hall, Precinct 89. Poll workers left the machine and locked up the precinct, Supervisor of Elections Gertrude Walker said, but she didn't know why.

The first crew that went to retrieve the machine grabbed the wrong one, one without any results. A second crew had to be dispatched.

"We've never had it happen before," Walker said.

Elections officials also had to manually rerun the early voting results from the four locations for Thursday through Saturday because the results from cards used in the machines showed errors when they were downloaded Tuesday night.

Officials had changed the cards Thursday to prevent overloading them with the high number of early voters, according to Canvassing Board member and County Commissioner Tod Mowery.

"We want to make sure we know exactly what happened," Mowery said of the recount.

The elections website had problems, too.

Unlike election websites in Martin and Indian River, St. Lucie's did not indicate how many precincts were included in the results. Elections Supervisor Gertrude Walker said the site would indicate when the results were final.

There also was a glitch with the "scrolling" results, which Walker fixed late in the night by having it refresh every three minutes, instead of every one minute. The shorter time frame was not allowing all of the races, amendments and referenda to appear before the site automatically refreshed, taking the user back to the top.

There also was a fracas at a Port St. Lucie precinct that prompted a visit from the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office.

More than 25 people arrived at the Minsky Gym after the polls closed at 7 p.m. Tuesday and demanded to vote, but deputies eventually persuaded them to leave peacefully with no arrests or rioting, as was rumored, Sheriff Ken Mascara said. The would-be voters were under the impression the polling hours had been extended until 8 p.m. based on a national TV news broadcast, Mascara said.

By 9 p.m., all voters in line at 7 p.m. had cast their ballot and the precinct closed.

The Minsky Gym precinct was the only polling place that still had people waiting in line to vote as of 8:30 p.m., Walker said.

"Ridiculous" was how Port St. Lucie resident James Carr described the scene about 5:50 p.m., when he lined up to vote. He said hundreds of people were waiting in a line that stretched across the Minsky Gym.

After waiting about half an hour, the single parent said he decided to leave without voting fearing the wait would make him too late to get home and make dinner for his family.

"There's no way I could do it," Carr said. "(The elections office) is crazy and should've been thinking about it."

There's no official number as to how many voters were waiting outside the precinct.

Carr said elections officials should've been prepared for the influx of voters after 5 p.m.

He said there were people who had been waiting in line since 5 p.m. He also said he saw people pulling into the crowded parking lot and leaving immediately without getting in line.